La 4e de couv. indique : "La destinée d'Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi est unique. Cette philosophe, psychanalyste et intellectuelle juive a longtemps fait figure d'héroïne occultée d'une époque qu'elle a pourtant marquée de ses batailles avec ténacité, générosité et constance. Le cours de sa vie et ses engagements audacieux ont conditionné son œuvre et accompagné les soubresauts d'un XXe siècle fécond entre désespoir et espérances. Née en Provence au lendemain du Premier Conflit mondial dans une famille de Juifs (...) séfarades assimilés, elle subit la Shoah de plein fouet avant de céder au chant des sirènes du jeune Israël. Cet essai rend justice à la mémoire d'une femme libre et engagée, philosophe et psychanalyste, dont l'œuvre pluridisciplinaire mérite admiration et reconnaissance.". (shrink)

Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom's barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men's blood.Albert Camus wrote these words in August 1944, as Paris was being liberated from German occupation. Although best known for his novels including The Stranger and The Plague, it was his vivid descriptions of the horrors of the occupation (...) and his passionate defense of freedom that in fact launched his public fame. Now, for the first time in English, Camus at 'Combat' presents all of Camus' World War II resistance and early postwar writings published in Combat, the resistance newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947. These 165 articles and editorials show how Camus' thinking evolved from support of a revolutionary transformation of postwar society to a wariness of the radical left alongside his longstanding strident opposition to the reactionary right. These are poignant depictions of issues ranging from the liberation, deportation, justice for collaborators, the return of POWs, and food and housing shortages, to the postwar role of international institutions, colonial injustices, and the situation of a free press in democracies. The ideas that shaped the vision of this Nobel-prize winning novelist and essayist are on abundant display. More than fifty years after the publication of these writings, they have lost none of their force. They still speak to us about freedom, justice, truth, and democracy. (shrink)

This book offers even more than its title promises. Embarrassed with my translation of échec, I emphasize that its authors not only reflect on "Man and Failure," but design a vast anthropological fresco by approaching their topic from psychological, economical, medical, religious and philosophical points of view. Jean Lacroix published a book on Failure some years ago; in 1968 he asked thirteen outstanding French writing personalities for contributions to an interdisciplinary study on the same issue. The result is a remarkable (...) collection of insights into this basic experience in human life. Joseph Nuttin, professor in experimental psychology, presents his most recent researches on the transformation of a person's needs and energies into a "project" of life. Failure, the unsuccess of such a project, gives cognitive information useful for subsequent conduct. Raymond Carpentier sees failure in the area of communication: it reveals the ambiguity of any information. On the level of consciousness, he writes, reality only exists in so far as its own failure is contained in its very structure. "Ambiguous like life itself, communication is what has reality only when it does not succeed in its materializations." François Perroux, economist, both calmly and alarmingly sketches the perhaps imminent failure of our economic system. Three other articles deal with ethnological and medical problems. The philosopher and psychoanalyst Mrs. Eliane Amado Lévy-Valenski, author of L'humanisme psychanalytique, le mythe grec et la phénoménologie biblique, pursues her threefold investigation: "Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology or Ontology of Failure?" To fail in one's efforts is both a trial and a temptation, but it also points toward the emergence of infinity within finitude. The three religious contributions give the most personal penetration of the subject. They are the center of the book. The last section deals with three philosophies: the failing thought of Being, the critique of humanism, the restoration of motivations in action. The first of them is due to Rouven Gilead, professor at the University of Tel-Aviv and author of one of the best books on Heidegger. His paper suggests what radical Failure would mean: not of man, nor of given historical situations, nor even of metaphysics, although these three approaches are true. But the "truth of Being" in modern subjectivity, in sciences and in philosophy remains hidden. Our horizon of thought is the nihilism of Being. The fundamental Failure, then, is the history of Being itself.--R. S. (shrink)

Natalie Z. Davis est une historienne bien connue pour ses recherches sur la France moderne (Les Cultures du peuple, rituels, savoirs et résistances au XVIe siècle, Aubier, 1979 ; Le Retour de Martin Guerre, Laffont, 1982 ; Pour sauver sa vie, Seuil, 1988) et son intérêt pour les femmes de cette époque (elle a notamment co-dirigé le volume 3 de l'Histoire des femmes, Plon, 1991). Quittant ici la Renaissance française sur laquelle ont porté l'essentiel de ses travaux, elle entre plus (...) ava... (shrink)

This book challenges the view that bad beliefs - beliefs that blatantly conflict with easily available evidence - can largely be explained by widespread irrationality, instead arguing that ordinary people are rational agents whose beliefs are the result of their rational response to the evidence they're presented with.

We are constantly called upon to evaluate the evidential weight of testimony, and to balance its deliverances against our own independent thinking. ‘Intellectual autonomy’ is the virtue that is supposed to be displayed by those who engage in cognition in this domain well. I argue that this is at best a misleading label for the virtue, because virtuous cognition in this domain consists in thinking with others, and intelligently responding to testimony. I argue that the existing label supports an excessively (...) individualistic conception of good thinking, both within and outside philosophy. I propose replacing ‘intellectual autonomy’ with ‘intellectual interdependence’, which properly emphasises the depth of our reliance on one another, without suggesting we ought ever to be epistemically servile. (shrink)

Neil Levy presents a new theory of freedom and responsibility. He defends a particular account of consciousness--the global workspace view--and argues that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. There are good reasons to think that the naïve assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true.

Although the literature on social innovation has focused primarily on social enterprises, social innovation has long occurred within mainstream corporations. Drawing upon recent scholarship on social movements and institutional complexity, we analyze how movements foster corporate social innovation (CSI). Our context is the adoption of green information systems (“green IS”), which are information systems employed to transform organizations and society into more sustainable entities. We trace the historical emergence of green IS as a corporate response to increasing demands for sustainability (...) reporting, a key social innovation that environmental activists helped to create. Drawing upon extensive survey data from more than 400 U.S. firms, we then examine how managers perceived environmental activism in relation to broader field pressures for change and how their perceptions of both were related to green IS adoption. The results reveal that activists were more effective at influencing adoption indirectly by transforming organizational fields than by directly influencing corporate managers. Combined with the historical analysis, these findings suggest that CSI emerged out of ongoing interactions between activists, corporate managers, and other influential actors within a broader social innovation system. Activists helped to create conditions for social innovation, but corporations took the lead in developing new practices. (shrink)

The widespread conviction that we are living in a post-truth era rests on two claims: that a large number of people believe things that are clearly false, and that their believing these things reflects a lack of respect for truth. In reality, however, fewer people believe clearly false things than surveys or social media suggest. In particular, relatively few people believe things that are widely held to be bizarre. Moreover, accepting false beliefs does not reflect a lack of respect for (...) truth. Almost everyone’s beliefs are explained by rationally warranted trust in some sources rather than others. This allows us to explain why people have false beliefs. (shrink)

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation‐based and memory‐based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy‐context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to (...) the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context—that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language‐dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory‐based theories, can be derived from lossy‐context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality. (shrink)

Abstract The typical explanation of an event or process which attracts the label ‘conspiracy theory’ is an explanation that conflicts with the account advanced by the relevant epistemic authorities. I argue that both for the layperson and for the intellectual, it is almost never rational to accept such a conspiracy theory. Knowledge is not merely shallowly social, in the manner recognized by social epistemology, it is also constitutively social: many kinds of knowledge only become accessible thanks to the agent's embedding (...) in an environment that includes other epistemic agents. Moreover, advances in knowledge typically require ongoing immersion in this social environment. But the intellectual who embraces a conspiracy theory risks cutting herself off from this environment, and therefore epistemically disabling herself. Embracing a conspiracy theory therefore places at risk the ability to engage in genuine enquiry, including the enquiry needed properly to evaluate the conspiracy theory. (shrink)

In this article we survey six recent developments in the philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility: (1) Harry Frankfurt's argument that moral responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise; (2) the heightened focus upon the source of free actions; (3) the debate over whether moral responsibility is an essentially historical concept; (4) recent compatibilist attempts to resurrect the thesis that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise; (5) the role of the control condition in free (...) will and moral responsibility, and finally (6) the debate centering on luck. (shrink)

So-called downshifters seek more meaningful lives by decreasing the amount of time they devote to work, leaving more time for the valuable goods of friendship, family and personal development. But though these are indeed meaning-conferring activities, they do not have the right structure to count as superlatively meaningful. Only in work – of a certain kind – can superlative meaning be found. It is by active engagements in projects, which are activities of the right structure, dedicated to the achievement of (...) goods beyond ourselves, that we make our lives superlatively meaningful. (shrink)

Philosophical orthodoxy has it that intentional action consists in one’s intention appropriately causing a motion of one’s body, placing the latter as (conceptually and/or metaphysically) prior to the former. Here I argue that this standard schema should be reversed: acting intentionally is at least conceptually prior to intending. The argument is modelled on a Williamsonian argument for the priority of knowledge developed by Jenifer Nagel. She argues that children acquire the concept KNOWS before they acquire BELIEVES, building on this alleged (...) developmental priority of knowledge to establish its conceptual priority. I start by taking a closer look at Nagel’s argument, canvassing extant objections to do both with the empirical adequacy of her claims and their philosophical implications. Doing so allows me in the second part of the paper to draw lessons that inform the construction of a revamped parallel argument for the priority of ACTS INTENTIONALLY. (shrink)

A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy.I suggest that these attempts have indeed captured the most important divergences between the two styles but have left the explanation of the differences mysterious.I argue that analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy conducted within a paradigm, in Kuhn’s sense of the word, whereas Continental philosophy assumes much less in the way of shared presuppositions, problems, methods and approaches.This important opposition accounts for all (...) those features that have rightly been held to constitute the difference between the two traditions.I finish with some reflections on the relative superiority of each tradition and by highlighting the characteristic deficiencies of each. (shrink)

Most philosophers think that phenomenal consciousness underlies, or at any rate makes a large contribution, to moral considerability. This paper argues that many such accounts invoke question-begging arguments. Moreover, they’re unable to explain apparent differences in moral status across and within different species. In the light of these problems, I argue that we ought to take very seriously a view according to which moral considerability is grounded in functional properties. Phenomenal consciousness may be sufficient for having a moral value, but (...) it may not be necessary, and it may contribute relatively little to our overall considerability. (shrink)

This book offers an original account of the history of liberal thought, one grounded in an institutional history of medieval pluralism and the early modern rationalizing state, and explores the deep tensions that liberal political thought rests upon.

McKenna’s critique (rather than criticisms) of idealized approaches to epistemology is an important contribution to the literature. In this brief discussion, I set out his main concerns about more idealized approaches, within and beyond social epistemology, before turning to some issues I think he neglects. I suggest that it’s important to pay attention to the prestige hierarchy in philosophy, and to how that hierarchy can serve ideological purposes. The greater prestige of more abstract approaches plays a role in determining what (...) issues and what voices we attend to. (shrink)

It’s widely held that a lack of intellectual humility is part of the reason why flagrantly unjustified beliefs proliferate. In this paper, I argue that an excess of humility also plays a role in allowing for the spread of misinformation. Citing experimental evidence, I show that inducing intellectual humility causes people inappropriately to lower their confidence in beliefs that are actually justified for them. In these cases, they manifest epistemic humility in ways that make them epistemically worse off. I argue (...) that epistemic humility may fail to promote better beliefs because it functions for us against the background of our individualistic theory of responsible epistemic agency: until we reject such theories, intellectual humility is as much a problem as a solution to epistemic ills. Virtue epistemology is inadequate as a response to unjustified beliefs if it does not look beyond the virtues to our background beliefs. (shrink)

There's heated debate around whether people who did terrible things in the past, at a time when there was widespread acceptance of such actions, are appropriately blamed by us, on the grounds they weren't really morally ignorant, or their ignorance was itself culpable. I point to puzzles that arise if we blame them. We need to explain how they could act so badly if they weren't fully ignorant. I argue that plausible answers to that question entail that they're not blameworthy, (...) or that we lack standing to blame them. (shrink)

Recent findings in neuroscience, evolutionary biology and psychology seem to threaten the existence or the objectivity of morality. Moral theory and practice is founded, ultimately, upon moral intuition, but these empirical findings seem to show that our intuitions are responses to nonmoral features of the world, not to moral properties. They therefore might be taken to show that our moral intuitions are systematically unreliable. I examine three cognitive scientific challenges to morality, and suggest possible lines of reply to them. I (...) divide these replies into two groups: we might confront the threat, showing that it does not have the claimed implications for morality; or we might bite the bullet, accepting that the claims have moral implications, but incorporating these claims into morality. I suggest that unless we are able to bite the bullet, when confronted by cognitive scientific challenges, there is a real possibility that morality will be threatened. This fact gives us a weighty reason to adopt a metaethics that makes it relatively easy to bite cognitive scientific bullets. Moral constructivism, in one of its many forms, makes these bullets more palatable; therefore, the cognitive scientific challenges provide us with an additional reason to adopt a constructivist metaethics. (shrink)

Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us (...) to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observation, and participation. By the end of middle childhood, most children are proficient food collectors. However, it is not until adolescence that adults (not necessarily parents) begin directly teaching children complex skills such as hunting and complex tool manufacture. Adolescents seek to learn innovations from adults, but they themselves do not innovate. These findings support predictive models that find social learning should occur before individual learning. Furthermore, these results show that teaching does indeed exist in hunter-gatherer societies. And, finally, though children are competent foragers by late childhood, learning to extract more complex resources, such as hunting large game, takes a lifetime. (shrink)

This edited volume focuses on the use of ?necessary condition counterfactuals? in explaining two key events in twentieth century history, the origins of the ...

I am to grateful to Geoff Keeling for his perceptive response1 to my paper.2 In this brief reply, I will argue that he does not succeed in his goal of showing that nudges to reason do not respect autonomy. At most, he establishes only that such nudges may threaten autonomy when used in certain ways and in certain circumstances. As I will show, this is not a conclusion that should give us grounds for particular concerns about nudges. Before turning to (...) this issue, let me correct some small issues of interpretation of my paper. Keeling takes me to be committed to three descriptive claims: that we have entered a post-truth era, that our problem with the rational assessment of evidence is explained by or stems from the backfire effect and that nudges to reason work by exploiting affective mechanisms. I am not committed to accepting any of these claims. …. (shrink)

Human beings are subject to a range of cognitive and affective limitations which interfere with our ability to pursue our individual and social goals. I argue that shaping our environment to avoid triggering these limitations or to constrain the harms they cause is likely to be more effective than genetic or pharmaceutical modifications of our capacities because our limitations are often the flip side of beneficial dispositions and because available enhancements seem to impose significant costs. I argue that carefully selected (...) environmental interventions respect agents’ autonomy and are consistent with democratic decision making. (shrink)

The author comments on the article “The Neurobiology of Addiction: Implications for Voluntary Control of Behavior,‘ by S. E. Hyman. Hyman’s article suggests that addicted individuals have impairments in cognitive control of behavior. The author agrees with Hyman’s view that addiction weakens the addict’s ability to align his actions with his judgments. The author states that neuroethics may focus on brains and highlight key aspects of behavior but we still risk missing explanatory elements. Accession Number: 24077912; Authors: Levy, Neil 1,2; (...) Email Address: [email protected]; Affiliations: 1: University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia; 2: University of Oxford; Subject: ADDICTIONS; Subject: ALCOHOLISM; Subject: COGNITION; Subject: BEHAVIOR; Subject: JUDGMENT; Subject: HYMAN, S. E.; Subject: NEUROBIOLOGY; Number of Pages: 2p. (shrink)

Abstract : Libet’s famous experiments, showing that apparently we become aware of our intention to act only after we have unconsciously formed it, have widely been taken to show that there is no such thing as free will. If we are not conscious of the formation of our intentions, many people think, we do not exercise the right kind of control over them. I argue that the claim this view presupposes, that only consciously initiated actions could be free, places a (...) condition upon freedom of action which it is in principle impossible to fulfil, for reasons that are conceptual and not merely contingent. Exercising this kind of control would require that we control our control system, which would simply cause the same problem to arise at a higher-level or initiate an infinite regress of controllings. If the unconscious initiation of actions, as well as the takings of decisions, is incompatible with control over them, then free will is impossible on conceptual grounds. Thus, Libet’s experiments do not constitute a separate, empirical, challenge to our freedom. (shrink)

Theories of self-deception divide into those that hold that the state is characterized by some kind of synchronic tension or conflict between propositional attitudes and those that deny this. Proponents of the latter like Al Mele claim that their theories are more parsimonious, because they do not require us to postulate any psychological mechanisms beyond those which have been independently verified. But if we can show that there are real cases of motivated believing which are characterized by conflicting propositional attitudes, (...) however, the parsimony argument against incongruent mental state accounts is undermined. I argue that anosognosia presents us with a real-life example of motivated belief together with (sub)-doxastic conflict. (shrink)